Polarization diversity receiving systems and methods are well known in wireless communications. For example, a wireless terminal may transmit a linearly-polarized signal that may be received by orthogonally polarized antennas (e.g., horizontal and vertical polarization) at a base station (terrestrial or space-based) to thereby separately receive orthogonally polarized portions of the transmitted signal. The orthogonally polarized portions may be combined to effectively increase link robustness, since many channel degradations such as fading, are largely uncorrelated when comparing antennas of orthogonal polarizations. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,526,278 to Hanson et al. entitled Mobile Satellite Communication System Utilizing Polarization Diversity Combining; U.S. Pat. No. 5,724,666 to Dent entitled Polarization Diversity Phased Array Cellular Base Station and Associated Methods; U.S. Pat. No. 6,418,316 to Hildebrand et al. entitled Increasing Channel Capacity of Wireless Local Loop via Polarization Diversity Antenna Distribution Scheme; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,445,926 to Boch et al. entitled Use of Sectorized Polarization Diversity as a Means of Increasing Capacity in Cellular Wireless Systems.
Other systems and methods that use polarization effects in wireless communications are described in the following publications: Andrews et al., Tripling the Capacity of Wireless Communications Using Electromagnetic Polarization, Nature, Vol. 409, Jan. 18, 2001, pp. 316-318; Wolniansky et al., V-BLAST. An Architecture for Realizing Very High Data Rates Over the Rich-Scattering Wireless Channel, Invited paper, Proc. ISSSE-98, Pisa, Italy, Sep. 29, 1998, pp. 295-300; and Cusani et al., A Simple Polarization-Recovery Algorithm for Dual-Polarized Cellular Mobile-Radio Systems in Time-Variant Faded Environments, IEEE Transactions in Vehicular Technology, Vol. 49, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 220-228.
It is also known to use diversity concepts to increase the capacity of wireless communications. See, for example, the following publications: Miller et al., Estimation of Co-Channel Signals With Linear Complexity, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 49, No. 11, November 2001, pp. 1997-2005; and Wong et al., Performance Enhancement of Multiuser MIMO Wireless Communications Systems, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 50, No. 12, December 2002, pp. 1960-1970.